


apocrita

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Art, Body Horror, Character Death, Collaboration, Gen, Gore, Possession, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-07
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-16 18:57:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3499301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are nasty consequences to breaking cosmic rules. Claire Novak learns the hard way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	apocrita

_I'm so sorry,_ she says. More with the flats of her molars than with her tongue. The way she grinds them against the pain is speech enough. If it's possible for teeth to plead, hers are begging.

 

_I know._ The throbbing in her skull responds in its own rhythm.

 

_Please don't do this._

 

There are thirty feet of empty alleyway in front of her: wet concrete, weeds pushing through; on a different day she might have found that kind of thing beautiful. Metaphorical. Something like that. Now it's all tilting on a flat axis, and she can't tell if she's tipping with it. Her feet are confused. She's amazed she's made it this far. If her head wasn't so full of hammers she would feel faint. She's going to fall.

 

_I can't stop it,_ says her scalp, thundering, as if her brain is going to bubble and explode. _I would if I could. This is what happens._

 

_I should never—_

 

_I know._

 

She feels her skull splitting open at the crown of her head before she tips forward onto the pavement. She's dead before her face meets the ground.

* * *

 

She gets the idea six months after Castiel leaves her on the side of the road, headed Nowhere Especially. She's kept her praying tongue in check, wary of summoning him accidentally to the house she's squatting in. Embarrassed, she supposes, of letting him see the way she's living.

 

She tried, she did. But no one will hire a seventeen-year-old with that many piercings and no paperwork, no home address. She sat outside a gas station with a styrofoam QuikTrip cup for about a day before she realised no one was going to give her more than fifty cents at a time. Perhaps, she thought, she didn't look homeless enough, desperate enough, filthy enough.

 

Claire showers by sneaking through a back door into a twenty-four hour gym when the receptionist goes on her smoke break. She eats by loitering behind the Wal-Mart until the day's waste comes out and snagging what's freshest before anyone comes to collect. And she sleeps in a Goodwill sleeping bag inside a house that reeks of nicotine and piss, the windows covered in brown paper, the door secured with a length of chain she found on the side of the road.

 

It's the deep end of summer, when the wind is beginning to turn chill at night, and the sun coming through the tears in the brown paper isn't as warm as it was before. Claire sits on her favourite windowsill, eating stale cake out of a plastic tub—two days old—watching the sun snag in the tree outside, watching a blue car come crawling up the road and off again, and very abruptly she feels the anger—it's surprising to her. She hasn't felt it in a long time, not since Castiel walked into the home wearing her father's face and greeted her for the first time in six years or more—it had died down, little by little, the longer she spent with him, the more it became apparent that he loved her, in his own small, weird, strange way. She'd learned to kill it, but now she feels it. Like heartburn in the wake of the mouthfuls of old sugar she's cramming into her face just to stave off the bite of starvation.

 

She throws the plastic tub aside, doesn't have the energy to care when icing splatters across her sleeping bag. Balls a fist in the brown paper and rips a long, satisfying swathe from it. In another life, she'd be in Pontiac, in the home she grew up in, Mom and Dad, watching the cold setting sun from the safety of that white-and-blue-appointed bedroom, the hearts stenciled on the walls, her kid's easel leaning in the corner, all her books strewn across the bookshelves—fuck.

 

Claire almost says his name but swallows it just in time. Scrapes a fingernail down the smooth window glass almost hoping that it will pop off and fly in her face.

 

She remembers those five minutes of possession better than anything else in her entire life. How every organ in her body had felt like it was spinning. How ecstatic and terrible it had been. She hadn't been weak and hungry then. She'd killed demons with a brush of her hand.

 

She puts her palm to her forehead, closes her eyes, remembers, oh, that blazing feeling of something dying underneath her.

 

She knows instinctively that her father had found no joy in it. Not that he ever said a word to her—she just knows, that he and she were built differently, albeit from the same stuff. But she—she still tastes him on the back of her tongue when she drops a tab of Ecstasy with the kids behind the high school; it's the closest she's ever come to being back in that tiny powerful body again. Everything in moderation, of course. Always. But now she's craving it again.

 

The real thing.

 

He'll never say yes.

* * *

 

It takes two weeks of hanging around until closing at every psychic new-age bullshit strip-mall store in this town and the next one and the next one before she finds the real deal, someone with books and with knowledge. Woman with the biggest red hair she's ever seen and one lazy eye, like something out of a bad comedy. Makes the mistake of wandering off with Claire still looking over her stash of angelic lore; by the time she gets back, Claire is long gone, and so are her books.

 

By the glow of her lighter Claire reads, and reads, and reads. In the slow hours of the afternoons when the cashiers are tired and business is sluggish she steals what she can, from the Whole Foods Store, from the farmer's market on Saturdays, from the shady guy who sets up shop in the alley on Fifth and will get you anything for the right quality blowjob. Seven months after Castiel disappears in his low-slung golden car she has everything she needs, and a brand new packet of white blackboard chalk, for the sigil, which she spent her last four bucks on, because it feels a little right, a little respectful, and she needs all the good will she's going to get.

 

Half these herbs she's never heard of, and lamb's blood tastes like shit. But she sits with the book open over her thigh, stirring everything together in her styrofoam QuikTrip cup with a plastic fork. Empty cellophane packages all over the floor like fallen leaves. She's got a tiny fire burning in a tuna can full of wood scraps, in the center of her chalk circle, just enough to see by, and when all her packages are empty and the mess in the cup is the consistency of some kind of horrible ground beef, she scoops it out with her fingers and kneads it into a ball small enough to swallow.

 

It sticks to her fingers—blood will do that—and when it's round she holds it above the flame until the blood begins to congeal and drip to the bottom of the makeshift sphere.

 

Leaves of God-only-knows-what begin to glow a little at the end, catching heat. The whole thing is melting and drooping in her hand like the most disgusting scoop of ice cream ever conceived. She doesn't give herself time to think before she puts it on the flat of her tongue and closes her mouth around it and thinks _hard._

 

The shock of it knocks her backwards, her head hitting the floor, her back arched towards the ceiling, her legs still crossed, somehow. There's a flash of light—or maybe that's just her eyes going blind for a moment—and then she rockets back up, spine snapping straight, the aftertaste of cold blood still sliding, gruesome, down her throat.

 

The flame in the can has gone out. It's dark in the house, and deadly still.

 

Claire daren't move. She stares straight ahead, waiting for feeling to return to her fingertips, her toes. There's a gentle honeybee buzz in the back of her skull, but it could be the pain—

 

Without warning she's vomiting into her hands, nothing but blood-streaked bile.

 

And then there is a sort of knocking at the front of her skull, like someone rapping their knuckles on a door to be let in.

 

_Claire,_ she hears, in the voice of her father, but also in the voice of a thousand others, right at the front of her brain, _what have you done?_

 

It's only the faintest feeling of that power she remembers from being small, but it's there—like gold leaf coating the undersides of all her limbs, the insides of her ribs, the backsides of her eyes.

 

“You're back,” she says, and she feels like crying, from joy and fear alike. Her hands are still wet. The room is still dark. She smiles, feeling as if her white teeth could light up the room, feeling wild and amazed.

 

Castiel says nothing in reply.

* * *

 

And in some ways, it works, that gold-leaf coating. She thinks her eyes must be brighter, her smile wider, her charisma restored. The QuikTrip hires her, part time, off the books. For a week she eats like a king in her little empty house. She tears off all the brown paper to let the dying autumn light in.

 

For the most part Castiel is silent, but she doesn't mind. It's the power she wanted, not the company. And it isn't much, but it's that little bit—that little extra spring in her step, the way she can draw herself up at the shoulders, open her torso, command the street she walks down.

 

When he does speak, it's all raw feeling and interpretation. He's in her, and he doesn't want to be. But she quietly reminds him—under her breath, stocking Slim Jims on a hook—that she wanted this, that she said that all-important Yes. He'll get used to it, she's sure. After all, he's been here before. And she owns him now, the way she owns her body.

 

Only once does he speak to her very clearly, so loud into her eardrum she almost collapses behind the register.

 

_This will be very bad for you,_ he says, _if you do not let me go._

 

It doesn't sound like a threat; it sounds like a fear.

 

Claire rings up her customer and forgets about it.

* * *

 

For a week, for two weeks, it works.

 

She comes into work early on a Sunday morning, before the sun is properly up, and the sky in the west is still grey and low, and the boy coming off his late shift stops dead when he sees her.

 

“Jesus, Claire,” he says. “What's up with your _eye_?”

 

He leaves before she can speak, skirting her like he'd skirt a leper, and stares at her all the way out the door. She watches him jog to his car and disappear.

 

In the restroom she shoves a Wet Floor sign beneath the handle for privacy and goes to the mirror.

 

At first she doesn't see it, because her eyes don't want to focus. When she lowers her head, enough to let her eyeballs slide up on their own, suddenly it's there.

 

Another eye. Another iris, like a poor Photoshop job, as if someone has pasted a contact lens to the bottom of her eyeball.

 

Of course, she panics—she slams on the sink and ducks her head under, holding down her eyelid, trying to wash it out—like some eyelash, or a hair—jams a fingernail into the red flesh and scrapes at it as much as she can without pain, but when she comes back up, face wet and flushed, her heart hammering, it's still there.

 

Peeking out over her eyelid, a tiny sliver of blue, and when she pulls down her lid it looks back at her, blank and unseeing.

 

Claire stares at herself for what feels like hours, hands braced on the sink, watching with horror that extra iris sliding gently in the natural wetness of her eyes, as if it's been there forever and ever.

 

There is a knock on the door, and she fumbles her sunglasses out of her back pocket and pushes them onto her face just as her manager calls in to her.

 

“Claire?”

 

“I'm fine,” she calls back, “I'm coming.” She looks hard at herself one more time, but the blackness of the lenses hides everything. She can almost pretend she's imagined it.

 

Castiel gets two words out— _do you—_ before she slams the bathroom door loud enough to drown him out, and then he is reticent again.

 

She tells the manager she has pink-eye, and promises not to touch her eyes at work. He sends her home at noon anyway.

 

Claire gathers up armfuls of torn brown paper and goes into her bathroom and covers up the cracked green mirror with them.

* * *

 

After a while, no one cares that she wears the glasses to work. She begs light sensitivity. She hasn't looked to see if it's still there. She gets more hours. She attributes it to the gold-leaf glow. Sometimes Castiel makes strange murmurs in the back of her brain when she is trying to sleep, but she learns to tune him out. He can mutter all he wants, so long as he stays.

* * *

 

She wakes up in the middle of the night with two tongues in her mouth and freezes.

 

The paper comes off the bathroom mirror like fistfuls of air and she opens her mouth as if to eat the flame of her lighter. Lifts her tongue to the roof of her mouth, and there—another tongue, smaller, like something vestigial, lying in the bottom of her mouth, the soft flesh, touching the backs of her front teeth.

 

Horrified, she slams her lighter closed and stands frozen in the dark.

 

Out the warped bathroom window the cold bare trees, naked for the winter, are waving like silent claws in the dark wind.

 

“Is this you?” she says, to the black space before her. Her words come out thick, hindered.

 

Her fingers clench around the edge of the sink. She feels like she could break the faux porcelain with her touch alone.

 

_I tried to warn you,_ Castiel says, a mournful prickle up the back of her neck.

 

“Make it stop.”

 

_I can't._

 

“You're an angel.”

 

_You broke the rules._ He's running down her arms now in trails of goosebumps.

 

“I said yes. I wanted it.” She begins to tremble, involuntarily. She can feel the new tongue, incredibly foreign in her mouth. “That's the rule.”

 

He's a gentle pain in the beds of her fingernails. She wishes he would flow out from under them like blood and down the drain.

 

_It goes both ways,_ he says.

 

She smashes the mirror with her fist before she knows she's moving. The glass falls in an absolute cascade into the sink.

* * *

 

          

                               

 

* * *

 

 

Every night she examines her naked body in the dark glass of the window that faces the overgrown backyard. Sunglasses off. She prods at her flesh as if she's searching for a tumor. She doesn't sleep afterward until exhaustion takes her.

 

Two days after the tongue she begins to grow new teeth. They are on the roof of her mouth, growing down, hanging like stunted stalactites, with no roots or nerves or gums. Dead bone, hanging inside her like botched piercings.

 

Then they begin to grow beneath her fingernails—uprooting them at the cuticle. Like the bamboo torture she's read about, in reverse. The nail of her right index finger falls off and sprouting from the bed is a flat incisor, bright white and unnatural. She pulls it out with a pair of pliers and it has grown back the next day. She has lost count of the teeth.

 

There is no way she can work now. It almost doesn't matter. She isn't hungry anymore. She fills her stomach with water, hating the feeling of it on that vestigial tongue. Most of it she vomits back up.

 

Every night she examines her naked body looking for the way he's sprouting out of her. Like the wasp that lays its eggs in the caterpillar. Her period has stopped. Her thighs are thinning. The skin below her left eye is splitting open and she can see the sickly white of a new eye inside the slit. Soon she knows it will open up and look at her.

 

Every night she swallows down as hard she can a plea for him to stop, and every night he answers back— _I can't stop it. This is what happens. You broke the rules._ I know, she screams, I know the rules, but I thought, I thought—and he sends what little comfort he can, a warmth up her back, but it isn't enough.

 

She wants to rip him out of her, but she doesn't know how.

* * *

 

Claire grows a sixth toe that keeps her from walking well. Claire's skull begins to change shape—nubs of bone at her temples sprouting, growing, like horns. Her tear ducts have shriveled. She cannot cry; this is something of a relief. She doesn't leave the house. She stands in the dark window for hours, imagining that she can see in time-lapse fast-forward the way her breasts are sinking in on themselves, the way her sternum is cleaving into two pieces, like the heads of snakes, pointed away from one another.

 

Her ribs heave when she breathes, visible, like the ribs of a starving dog; she thinks she has grown three extra.

 

“How do I fix it?”she pleads, dry-sobbing, unable to form real words with a mouth full of too many teeth and tongues. “Please, please, I never meant to.”

 

_I know,_ he says. _I'm sorry, I'm sorry._

 

There's a constant humming in her head, like a bird with Mach-speed wings. There are razors in the cabinet below the sink but she's scared of what colour her blood will be if she tries. She's too frozen in fear to do anything anyway.

* * *

 

When she feels two spines with her fingers—two parallel spines, bending and twisting and leaning in sync with one another—she knows she has to leave; she has to get to Lebanon. The Winchesters will help her. They have to. She can get there. Castiel almost sighs some kind of relief, she thinks, when she makes up her mind, and pulls on her boots for the first time in weeks, struggling with split heels and masses of tendons that have sprouted overnight.

 

_Help me,_ she says, asking with her mind now instead of her mouth. She can hardly even open it now; her jaw has gone rigid, heavy with teeth. _Help me get to them._

 

_I will,_ he says. He's enough energy in her legs to push her to her unsteady feet.

 

In all of this, somehow, she cannot blame him. She tastes lamb's blood in her throat every moment of every day and knows whose fault this is. It goes both ways.

* * *

 

Her hood barely covers the bones rising from her skull—there are seven of them now, like some sort of awful crown around the perimeter of her scalp. She keeps her mouth shut, her eyes covered. Thank God she came down where she did, not far from the highway that runs through the city where the brothers are; Castiel directs her, a compass point in the front of her brain. She walks though her walking is unsteady.

 

It's freezing—dead winter. Claire barely feels it. Barely feels anything, except the loud humming in her head, a persistent pounding in her skull. She feels as if her brain has been sucked out, as if there's nothing left in her but the need to walk west, stumbling towards the highway, reflexively counting and recounting her fingers to be sure they are the right number, hiding the sprouting teeth at their tips in the pockets of her hoodie.

 

Someone gawps at her skinniness as she passes into town, and calls after her, but the roar in her head is loud, loud. She keeps walking.

 

When she starts to cry, it isn't tears; it's blood, straining up through her shriveled tear ducts, and she knows, she knows, she isn't making it out of town. She's barely halfway down the main drag and there's no breath in her lungs. The pounding of her head is louder than the pounding of her heart. She did this, she did this, she did this to herself.

 

She trips, catches herself on the edge of a building. Sandstone scrapes into her palm. Castiel is the anxious bird-like hum in her brain. He wants her to go west. She wants to go west so badly she thinks she might scream. She wants to scream herself across six towns and into Lebanon. She was never going to get there.

 

Her double spines keep her rigid, painful. She's going down the alley now, though she doesn't want to. Her hood falls back, her hands come out. Her vision starts to skew.

 

_Claire,_ Castiel says, drum-drum-drumming in her head.

 

_I'm so sorry._ It's all she can think to say to him. She's sobbing, dry-heaving, blood pouring down her face, stinging the third eye above her cheekbone. The alley whirls and then jars to a stop. Still she stumbles.

 

_I know._

 

_Please don't do this._

 

There are thirty feet of empty alleyway in front of her: wet concrete, weeds pushing through; on a different day she might have found that kind of thing beautiful. Metaphorical. Something like that. Now it's all tilting on a flat axis, and she can't tell if she's tipping with it. Her feet are confused. She's amazed she's made it this far. If her head wasn't so full of hammers she would feel faint. She's going to fall.

 

_I can't stop it,_ says her scalp, thundering, as if her brain is going to bubble and explode. _I would if I could. This is what happens._

 

_I should never—_

 

_I know._

* * *

 

He's there, every day. A war vet, and everyone knows it. Down on his luck; it's apparent. Hasn't had a home in twenty years but does alright. The locals joke about clockwork, but they care enough to drop their spare change into his Starbucks cup when they pass, and he's happy enough to take it.

 

He's there, today, and when he hears the weird guttural gasping far off on the other end of the alley, and turns, shifting inside the mound of blankets and coats he's built for himself, and sees her—pretty little blonde thing, can't even be eighteen, stumbling like a drunk down the way.

 

“Miss?” he calls out. “You okay?”

 

He's watching when she topples over, and he sees it, though no one would believe it if he told it—how her skull splits open like a watermelon splitting under an axe, hand to God, she hasn't even hit the ground when it happens. It's like some invisible cleaver came and struck her down. She hits the concrete and is motionless.

 

He pauses—looks this way and that out into the street—then unfolds himself from his mound of blankets and coats, picks up his Starbucks cup with two fingers for safekeeping. Limps—leg wound, Korea—down the alley, hesitant, peering at the strange dead girl, her cracked-open head leaking blood and brain like egg yolk into the asphalt cracks.

 

He kneels down beside her, intending to look for a pulse—barely registers the weird spires of bone rising from what's left of her head, the strange crook to her spine.

 

Then out of the crevasse of her skull hops the smallest blue hummingbird he's ever seen.

 

He looks at it, and it looks at him—perching, tiny talons wrapped around the edge of her cloven bone—its black eyes no bigger than poppy seeds in its head. He looks; it tilts its head, the way that birds do; he understands, suddenly, what it wants.

 

He cups his hands, rests them gently on the girl's broken skull, an invitation.

 

The hummingbird flutters into his hands, trusting as anything.

 

He raises it towards his face, and—feeling, innately, that this is the only thing he has ever been meant for—he opens his mouth, and waits for it to fly inside.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Collaboration with [Tania](nobledemons.tumblr.com) and I. Art by Tania, fic by me.]


End file.
